Keep On Knocking
by FuriousAngelX
Summary: Finally, I've added what has long been finished and waiting to be read and reviwed. Go for it. Chapter 3 sees Daniel meeting a sanguinary destiny and coming to grips with a long-forgotten past linked to the blood-tainted streets of Silent Hill. Chapter 4
1. Chapter 1

Keep On Knocking

__

Well, I'm here again.

Huh?

Again?

I've never been here before.

But the presence of familiarity hangs thick over this place.

It's as if I know this place in some dark corner of my memory, but there's a smokescreen there.

Guarding something.

Huh? Guarding what?

Guarding something that probably should be left far behind.

* ****

Chapter One

Daniel found himself staring at the dense fog that appeared to dance upon the surface of the murky lake as he suddenly felt his wandering mind fall back into his head like a coin dropped into a well. He pulled himself to his feet and turned away from the jetty on the lake, and began to walk on the loose gravel road which connected to Bachman Road.

Daniel's recount of what happened and how he got there was vague. All he could remember was that he had been walking along the barriers of the highway, not a single car had passed him for hours. Why he was walking along a highway to a place unknown at that time of night, he did not know, but he recalled it was almost hypnotic. He remembered clearly, however, that he heard sirens calling out in the distance, and he had suddenly blacked out. When he had come to, almost four hours had passed on his watch, and he found himself in a small rowboat, rowing across the dark lake in the thick mist, and discovered that he had come to the resort town of Silent Hill. Though one thing was for certain: something beyond the mere whims of human desire and impulse had drawn him to this place. It was as if his fate was no longer in his control; like something from a long, distant past wished to reveal itself, and it seemed in everything that had currently happened, Silent Hill was part of it. He was somehow connected to this town; he felt it.

Daniel could feel a distant heart beat pulsating in his head as he advanced toward the town, the pulse growing stronger as the gap was closing between him and a force that would ultimately unveil itself in Silent Hill. He sometimes questioned himself now whether he was actually going crazy, whether this wasn't all just going on inside his head.

The gravel road finally met the sealed tar road just around the bend, and Daniel came to a halt. The sky was still gloomy, the fog continued to obscure any light that would even attempt to cut through the gloom.

Before him on the other side of the street was a line of small houses, old wooden style homes painted in a variety of dull blues and greys.

__

I used to live in a house like this.

The thought flashed before him like a blinding wall of white light, and it had caught him off guard.

But he knew that his own mental voice was right. He had lived in a house like these that he saw when he was young.

Daniel didn't remember much of his early childhood. His only memories were the ones that always would remain so close and he would not even notice it. His mother had disappeared from all knowledge when he was three, and his father has died when he was six, and the trauma of these incidences were the most likely reasons why all other memory of his childhood was obscured. Yet, despite all this, why, he wondered, would he have remembered a home that he had resided in when he was a child.

Suddenly, the fog that swirled around him began to dissipate, and a bleak darkness began to envelope the sky again, like a solar eclipse. Daniel's vision that had been previously dulled by the fog had been momentarily restored, and though at first he thought that his interpretation of the buildings had merely altered due to the prior obscurity, but soon realised that in a way that he could not quite put his finger on, the buildings had changed. Physically, they had not changed, but there was a significant difference in them. He could feel it.

Out in the distance, the sirens beamed out again, the sound approaching as if it were travelling down a tunnel that connected to the inside of Daniel's skull. Daniel grabbed his head as the sharp sudden pain began to stab from the inside, and he fell to his knees.

His vision began to blur as if he were feverishly delirious, and then as he felt the last foundations of his strength crumbled, he collapsed, his body slumping to the ground, and darkness covered his eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

__

The room is dark and as hot as blood rushing to the head.

The door is thumping, quickened like the beating heart.

Its pulse drives the boy mad. He squeezes his palms against his ears to shut out the sound, but to no avail. It keeps beating inside his ears, as if trying to mock a guilty conscience.

Tears begin to fall as the little boy, who sits with knees tucked to his small chest, continuously stares at the bloodstained knife that lies on the carpet.

The little boys runs out of the house, breathing hard and fast, onto the street and into the fog.

*****

Daniel came to, jolting from his blackout with a start. Droplets of cold sweat coarsed down his face and from the tips of his perspirant matted hair. During his unconsciousness, he had dreamt placelessly about a small boy. He did not understand its significance, but he recognised that deep, thumping heartbeat. The thing that was drawing him closer was as vivid and at the same time, as mysterious as the dream. 

__

Drawing me?

What is drawing me? To where?

[Or more to the point, to what?]

"Why in God's name am I here?" Daniel cried out in frustration.

Suddenly, he heard the wind swirling up the road behind him, and as it thrust past him, he heard what sounded like a hushed breath whispered beside his ear. He spun around, only to see the dry leaves dying down with the exhausted flow of the short-lived wind.

Daniel slowly turned back around, and something caught his eye. A trail of blood footprints led away from him, up the street for a few metres and around the corner until they were out of view. The footprints were delicately small, as if made by the feet of a young child.

Daniel thought for a moment, considering what he should do next. He was strangely compelled to follow the bloody footprints. He began to follow, starting off in a slow, almost cautious advance which, suddenly, in the middle of the road, broke into a desperate run, his mind speeding ahead even further than his own pumping legs were carrying him.

__

Where am I going? Was the constant, doubtful thought that played over in his mind like a bad television lymeric, when he tried to rationalise everything that had happened. Yet, the dark allure of these events, despite the disturbing nature that danced about them, captivated him. He _wanted _to follow them.

But each time he analysed the figurative elements of the signs that were being unveiled before him were accumatively frightening him each time. For each of them symbolised children. He felt it.

What else seemed logical?

Nothing.

The resurgence of a vague childhood.

The vision of the boy staring at the bloody knife.

The child-size footprints of blood mysteriously matted upon the surface of the road.

Yes. It made sense.

Something happened to him in his innocence as a child. Something foreboding and terrible.

Something that should have been left in the grave.

That last thought caused Daniel to shiver.

__

That other mental voice of the Daniel who focused on the bleakness of the glass half-empty again. Damn him.

Daniel continued to run, around the corner and up the long street. Both sides of the street were lined with dull, unwelcoming houses, with a perfect column of maple trees planted in the grass outside the footpath, just before the curb.

The thick grey of the gloom seemed to intensify; he couldn't see beyond about four or five metres ahead of him.

Daniel looked at the road. The blood footprints had suddenly stopped, as if whoever made them (_that is, if this is not all going on in my head_, he thought) had just vanished into thin air.

He walked on, convinced that this was where he was intended to be. As he advanced toward what would usually be the end of a street, the grey gradually became a pure white light, as if there were some light trying to cut through the fog.

He suddenly stopped in the middle of the road, when he saw that the white, in fact, was a solid object and just behind it, he noticed that the road stopped, dropping into a vertical deadfall as if there had been an earthquake.

The fog began to dissipate again. The sky began to darken and the object was no longer obscured by the black background.

The white object was a long, thin billboard, its posts hammered crudely into the crumbling tar road. It looked as if the road was collapsing inwards from the deadfall.

It was as long as from one side of the road to the other, and stretched high into the dark sky.

Daniel's eyes widened in disbelief, the thought of such a large thing being erected by human hands seemed abysmal (which was why he was quick to discard the idea, given that the things happened were definitely not things caused by human hands).

And dead in the centre of the billboard, scrawled in blood by a shaky, child-like hand, was written:

Daddy

Daniel's heart began to thump in terror as he heard the heartbeat within his head, offbeat with his own. But this time, it seemed more as if the heartbeat was audible, as if it was less a psychological factor, rather becoming a material thing. It was coming from the direction behind, from one of the houses beyond the trees and the footpath.

Daniel slowly turned around, and suddenly knew where it was coming from.

He was afraid, but now he was certain that he was close to discovering why he was brought to Silent Hill.

The heartbeat was the key.

He could hear those sirens in the distance again. Their echo drew closer to home as he found himself collapse to his knees, and suddenly the black curtain of unconsciousness drew across his eyes.

__

Daddy……?


	3. Chapter 3

Keep On Knocking

Chapter Three

_The little boy is sitting curled up in a tight ball of terror on the sofa, his attention turned away from the static of the television, but rather, he stares at that foreboding brown door._

_Its not thumping with a pulse anymore_

_but its thumping alright. Viciously, something is trying to force its way through the locked door, and the little boy begins to sweat profusely._

"_Let me out, you fucking little shit!" The boy hears a deep, angry male voice spill from behind the door, "if you don't open this fucking door right now, I'm gonna beat the livin' shit out of you!"_

_Silence. The tears fall once more._

"_I'll fucking kill you!" the voice screams, "I'll kill you, y'hear me, you little maggot!!"_

_The boy leaps up from his crouch and runs into the kitchen._

_He pushes a wooden stool over to the bench and drags a long, sharp knife from its wooden block._

_The boy climbs back down, and warily, he re-enters the television room to the manic screaming of the angry voice._

Daniel woke up, but even so, he could not reason whether he was truly alive or dead. Everything was black.

There was no road; no street, no trees, no street-lights, no houses; there was no sky. It was as if he was trapped in an airtight cube, save that the blackness knew no boundaries as the darkness rolled on into the distance.

Daniel stood up and began to walk; as if the blackness beneath his feet was solid.

_Where am I?_

"Hey!" Daniel cried out, as if someone could hear him, "Let me out! Let me out, goddammit! Let me the fuck out now!!"

.....

Nothing. Nothing but a hollow echo.

Daniel fell to his knees and began to sob like a child. He sounded as if his bitter tears were mixed a nefarious giggling.

"Fuck", he murmured, his voice jumping as he laughed behind his weeping, "why the hell is this happening to me?"

Suddenly, he tumbled and began to fall through the blackness, as if a trapdoor had given way beneath him. He fell like a stone from the sky, and as he fell, he saw a blurred, insubstantial image, like a jumpy screen projection, following him down; _down, down the rabbit hole into Wonderland_, Daniel thought with bitter amusement. It was of a small boy; his teeth grit and eyes tightly shut as he pressed his hands against his small ears. Tears leaked down his cheeks.

Daniel's eyes widened in awe and wonder as he recognised the image from

the blackout

a dream he had had. It was the same little boy.

Suddenly, Daniel heard a voice, but not inside his head; rather inside the blackness, echoing as if it were a tunnel. It was a female voice; lud yet gentle and soothing, and it seemed so frighteningly farmiliar; yet Daniel could not place where it seemed farmiliar from his conscious memory.

"Daniel", the voice said.

"Where am I?" Daniel replied almost before the soothing voice had finished whispering his name.

"You are in the zero-world, where nothing exists".

"Why am I here?! Let me out!"

"You are here to learn of a truth from which you cannot unearth in life or in death".

"What are you talking about?"

"It is here where you must understand why you have returned to Silent Hill. Of a secret which lies here, buried with your past".

"My past?" Daniel said, "You mean..."

..._this is my hometown?_

_Well, I'm back here again_

"Yes. It is".

"What secret? I don't have any secrets".

"Oh but you do", the voice replied, "You have a secret that not even you yourself recall it. You _chose_ to forget it!"

Daniel could not reply. He simply gazed at that torturous image of the little boy crying; hurting; trying to escape

_that fucking horrible screaming_

something. He did not know what, but something about the boy's fear burned brightly with farmiliarity in his belly. As if it reflected....

..._.my own?_

"Do you remember your parents, Daniel?" the voice asked.

"Yes", he answered, "my mother disappeared when I was three. Abducted, probably raped as well, according to common theory. My daddy.." He paused. "My _father_, he died when I was six. Heart failure".

There was a short, brutal laugh that seemed to chase Daniel as he continued to plunge deeper into the darkness.

"You even altered the past so you could believe a lie to forget a past which quite thankfully would have been forgotten".

Daniel's features twisted, puzzled. "What are you sa—".

"I'm saying that your parents were murdered, Daniel", the voice cut him off, "But both were killed by different people, in the same time period. And the second death was a consequence of the first".

Daniel's eyes were downcast with shock, and silent tears spilled down his cheeks. He did not want to believe it; all that this voice had told him. After all it was just a voice; could be all going on in his head. But somehow, he felt a release within; the penny had dropped and a lock on his heart had been removed. He felt he knew the truth, but still could not identify his position within it.

"I must leave you now, but with a warning", the voice concluded, "as you unearth the final fragments of the truth, so shall you ressurect a part of that truth that should have stayed buried in the past, but will rise again to consume before you awaken to the dawn of truth. It _burns_ for revenge".

"Wait!" Daniel cried, reaching out to the darkness, "who are you?"

"I am—"

But the voice did not finish. The faint sound of the sirens grew stronger and surrounded him, the echo entirely consuming the blackness; drowning out the voice completely. Daniel stopped falling, and there was an end to the darkness....


	4. Chapter 4

Keep on Knocking

Chapter Four

_The little boy peers around the corner of the bedroom doorway, afraid yet intrigued by the raised voices emitting from the room. He sees a man at the foot of the bed, towering over a smaller woman, who sits on the egde of the bed, drowning in tears._

_The man leans in close, pushing his face closer into the woman's own. The boy cannot make out what the man is saying under his breath, but he seems to be taunting the weeping woman. The little boy stares intently for a moment; but then, the enraged man raises a closed fist, and then it suddenly snaps out like an agitated snake, slamming into the woman's nose. She recoils, and blood begins to instantly drip from the orifice._

_The man begins to shout again, leaping onto the woman's belly as sobs fiercely on the bed, and then he raises both fists and continually beats her in the head. The boy shrieks, as if he feels the woman's pain._

_But soon, there is no more crying. The boy curls up against the wall outside the doorway, his teeth grit and his eyes tightly shut, thin tears squeezing from beneath the closed lids. His hands are pressed firmly against his ears, as if to shut some voice out._

_The little boy rises from the wall, and siezes a wooden chair from the dining room and drags it back to the bedroom doorway. He suddenly sees the angry red face of the man glaring at him from in the room, and as he begins to stride fiercely towards the boy, he slams the door shut and wedges the chair under the door handle. The knob twists vigirously, but the door does not open._

_The man howls in defiance, and begins to thump on the door._

Daniel woke up in the unlit corridor of a house. He rose, turned, and gazed out the pane of the door. It was dark outside, but he could see the pavement beyond the front steps, and the trees a little further beyond.

_At least I'm back to reality_, Daniel thought, but doubt of this quikcly returned to his mind.

Daniel turned again, and began to walk steadily down the dim corridor, his footsteps echoing eerily in the house's empty silence. He could not see much, save for a closed door to his left, and an archway at the end of the corridor, but he could not see what was beyond. Daniel's hand snaked out and he wrenched the door's knob, but the lock was jammed and the door would not give passage.

Daniel continued to advance to the end of the hall, and passed into a large room, filled with old household items. From some pale light emanating somewhere outside, Daniel could make out the cobwebs that lined the items. He scanned the room; there was a window in the far left wall, a closet door in the opposite wall; near the window. To his right was a set of armchairs an a couch surrounded a distance away from an ancient-looking, cobweb-coated television set. Cut into the wall behind Daniel near the right wall, was another archway, which probably led to a dining room or a kitchen.

And against the far wall, about four feet right of the closet door, was an ominous-looking wooden door. It was closed and there was a wooden chair wedged under the doorknob.

Suddenly, Daniel finally understood. The visions during his blackouts finally made sense.

This was _his_ house.

As Daniel watched the door blast open and the chair fly across the room and break against the near wall, he saw the vision as one long, dark revelation.

The boy had sat, watched in terror as the woman, his mother was beat in the head continuously in a vulgar display of power by the man.

His father.

But when the crying had stopped, the boy knew what his father had done. He had gone one step too far this time.

He had beat his mother to death.

And when the father realised that his son had witnessed the brutal killing, he went after him. To silence him.

But the boy had anticipated his father. The boy had slammed the bedroom door closed and jammed the knob so his father could not get out and beat him. Maybe even do the same thing as he did to his mother.

His father began that terrible thumping on the door, screaming; _"Let me out you fucking little shit! I'll fucking kill you, I'll kill you, y'hear me, you little maggot!!"_. The boy had scrambled over the couch, ran through the archway and into the kitchen, drawing a large preparation knife from its wooden block, and ran back to the couch, tucking his knees to his chest, his eyes set on the thumping door.

Suddenly, his father had thrust the door open, the chair sailing across the room and into the wall, breaking it into several pieces. His father stormed out of the bedroom, toward the little boy who sat on the couch and had concealed the knife under his leg; gazing into his father's face with terror. The man had raised his curled fist as he stooped over his son, when the boy leapt to his feet, then lunged onto his father's chest.

His father froze; his face manipulating in an expression of bewilderment and horror as the boy grit his teeth and the tears returned as he drove the knife through the soft flesh of his father's chest. He dragged the blade clear and thrust it into his chest once more; and again, and again and again. His father tried to scream, but only a gurgle rose from his throat as blood bubbled in his gullet. He collapsed to the floor, the little boy still clinging onto the handle of the entrenched blade.

The little boy took one final gaze into his father's eyes; his iris' burned with rage but there was the fear of a cornered animal within the stare he gave the boy. Then he twisted the blade.

His father jolted, gasping for one more breath, the blood now rising to his lips; and then, he slumped on his back; the life fleeing from his body.

The boy had pulled th knife out of his dead father's flesh and cast it onto the carpet. He grabbed his father's ankles, and with much struggling and effort, he pulled the lifeless corpse into the bedroom, where he saw his mother's limp body, stretched across the bed. He released his father's ankles, and cautiously stepped over to the bed. The boy looked into his mother's elegant face, and was suddenly buried in bitter tears. Her eyes were closed now, the tears dry on her cheeks. Her face was matted with blood. The boy reached over and kissed her forehead; saying his goodbyes, but all too late.

The boy ran out to the dining room again, and took another chair away from the table, but the time he did not rush back to the door with the same sense of urgency as he had before. He had lost his source of love to brutality, and it had seemed like time now stood still.

The little boy took the doorknob in his bloodsmeared fingers and closed the door

_for good_

and wedged the chair under the knob.

The boy had sat down on the couch and stared at the television, but found nothing more than static buzzing across the screen. He tucked himself into a tight ball, staring at the static emptiness of the television, trying to ignore the bloostained knife that lay on the carpet, and the hearbeat of his father

_that came from the bedroom_

that echoed inside his head. The boy had pressed his ears shut with his palms, but the beating did not stop. It mocked him; haunted it him. It drove him mad.

The boy ran out the front door, onto the street and into the fog. Never to return to that house as its door closed behind him. For good.

And as Daniel stood, seeing the vision like a drawn-out cinematic sequence, and realised the truth, a figure began to emerge from the shadows of the now-open bedroom.

_I am...the boy. Who killed his father who killed his mother._

_And now_, Daniel thought as he knew who

_what_

the figure was before he even saw his

_its_

face, _I confront the returned evil that wishes to drag down the final element of the secret he wishes to kill for good. I must confront—_

"—Father".

Daniel stood and stared at his father—or what was left of him. His face was mishappen; the skin and most of the flesh decayed, though revealing some of the still-remaining muscle and sinew that twitched underneath. His lips were drawn-back and rent, and a single baleful eye glared at him—the socket of the second all but gone; replaced by a clump of maggots writhing within. The flesh of his limbs was all but hanging from his bones, but his chest was still intact with foetid flesh, caked in dried blood.

A dried-up, ghastly voice that resembled dead leaves rustling in the wind emerged from the tattered remenants of his throat. "My son, you have returned to me".

"I am no son of yours", Daniel spat contemptuously, "I can accept truth, just as I can accept defeat in life. That's what makes me different from you. You only woke up because you still cannot come to grips with the truth. Your fate".

The corpse cackled at this; the laugh reminding Daniel all the more that this was his father.

"You cannot accept the fact that you killed my mother but you died as a consequence of an innocent woman's death, by the hand of your own son", Daniel continued, "you cannot accept your own defeat. I once believed that 'what goes around comes around' was just a stupid proverb. But it seems fate is not without a sense of irony".

"Yet I have come back, but this time to taste victory, VICTORY LIKE NEVER KNOWN BEFORE!" the father-corpse declared, "and you will go to the same place as that fucking hell-bitch that was your mother went!"

"The corpse began to shamble toward him, yet Daniel was surprised by the sheer speed at which the thing moved; like it was not just a living corpse but an evil mannequin animated by some demonic force. It closed the gap and reached out with its dirty, overgrown claws, and Daniel pressed himself against the wall. The stench of his father's decay was insidous, as he realised as the zombie moved in and opened its maw, ready to take a chunk out of his flesh.

Daniel suddenly launched his foot out into the creature's rent belly, knocking the thing back. It stumbled over the old couch and fell to the floor. He siezed the largest piece of the broken chair from the floor (which as the seat with a single leg still in place), and strode toward the fallen corpse as it struggled to get back to its feet. Daniel raised the chair above his head and brought it down onto the creature's rank head, bludgeoning it again, again and again. A dull, wet whimper of what may have been pain escaped its rotting throat. Daniel twisted the chair around so the remaining leg was pointing at his father's face, and then growled;

"Go back to the Hell where you came from".

With that, he stabbed the chair leg down, caving in the corpse's skull. What unlife had been animating the thing left it.

_For good, I hope._

A voice of a woman, both strong yet gentle, rang inside his head.

"You have released me", it said, and Daniel recognised it as the voice from the blackness, "And I thank you, my son".

Daniel was left in the shadows.

-M.T 2003

"Silent Hill" FanFiction


End file.
